Media display systems have become increasingly sophisticated as technology advances have made more media streams available to users. From over the air broadcasts to Internet streaming video, media display systems are now enabled to manage and process a variety of complex media streams. Indeed, in some prior art solutions, a dedicated media centered graphical user environment managed by a computing system may be utilized to display various types of media streams. A dedicated media centered graphical user environment is an environment that provides a graphical user interface dedicated to managing media streams thus greatly simplifying user interaction while viewing media content. As a practical matter, however, simplifying user interaction (by limiting computer functionality) in a dedicated media centered graphical user environment can pose undesired limitations.
For example, FIG. 1 is an illustrative flowchart of a prior art method of receiving a hidden dialog. In a standard computing system, dialogs may be utilized to inform a user of various programmatic and system conditions. For example, a virus program subscription notification may be displayed to remind a user to update a subscription. In media centered graphical user environments, however, a user may be shielded from dialogs as a result of inherent limited functionality of the environment. As such, dialogs may remain hidden from a user unless specific action is taken to view those hidden dialogs. Thus at a first step 104, in prior art systems, a hidden dialog is received. As noted above, a hidden dialog is a dialog that, in a media centered graphical user environment is not displayed to a user as in at a step 106. The method then determines whether the computing system is shutdown or logged off at a step 108. If the computing system is shutdown or logged off at a step 108, the user misses the hidden dialog at a step 116. That is, where a media centered graphical user environment is being utilized, the computing system may simply shutdown or log off directly from the environment thus never revealing the hidden dialog. The method then ends.
If the computing system is not shutdown or logged off at a step 108, a user may minimize or exit the media centered graphical user environment at a step 110. At this point, outside of the media centered graphical user environment, the hidden dialog may be seen at a step 112. A user may then choose to ignore, or react to the hidden dialog in accordance with user preferences. At a next step 114, the user may return to the media centered graphical user environment to continue viewing media. The method then ends.
As can be appreciated, hidden dialogs may contain system critical information for a user. Thus, it may be advantageous to mitigate occurrences of hidden dialogs in media centered graphical user environments so that a user may address computing system issues without unduly interfering with a user's viewing experience. Therefore, methods and systems for handling hidden dialogs in a media centered graphical user environment are presented herein.